It is often times desirable to print alphanumeric text from a processing system such that the text has a sideways orientation in the printed output. A sideways orientation means that the text is rotated 90 degrees on the page. The lines of text go along the length of the page instead of across the width of the page as usual.
For example, a table containing columns of data may be wider than the width of the paper in the printer. If the table of data was oriented 90 degrees, i.e., sideways, then the width of the table would run the length of the paper instead of the paper's width. Then, the table of data could be printed within the boundaries of the page.
There are several commercially available software packages that print a document sideways, and can rotate an image. Some of these include the following: "Sideways" by Funk Software Inc., "Printer Boss" by Connecticut Software Inc., "Digicon Print Pkg." by Digital Concepts Inc., and "Printworks" by Softstyle Inc..
These commercially available software packages for printing sideways only print in all points addressable (APA) mode. All points addressable mode converts a normal character code into an image of dots. This requires a great amount of data since each dot of the character has to be represented. For sideways printing, the image is rotated and sent to the printer. This method is slow because there is a lot more data to be sent per character in the APA mode. This problem is amplified in letter quality printing since there are a greater number of dots per character to produce a higher resolution letter quality character. Consequently, the amount of data that must be sent to the printer to print the character increases proportionately with the increased number of dots in the character. In APA mode, as the letter quality increases, the printing speed decreases.
Another limitation with the commercially available software for printing sideways is that the software does not support some of the important functions required in letter quality printing such as underscored text, emphasized text, superscribed, and subscripted text.
Additionally, most printers that print in APA mode do not allow the control of all of the available dots in a printer. As a result, fully formed letters cannot be printed as required by letter quality sideways printing.
As an alternative to using software to print sideways in APA mode, another method known in the art to print sideways is to use a laser jet printer which rotates the characters to be printed. One known laser jet printer is made by Hewlett Packard. This printer contains a font having characters that are rotated sideways. In utilizing this type of printer, the processing system would send a normal character to the printer through a data stream, and the printer would rotate the character and print the character using the rotated font.
There are several problems with using a printer of this sort to print sideways. First, a printer that contains the ability to rotate characters is necessarily equipped with additional utilities to perform this function which increases the cost of the printer. Secondly, there is no way to automatically intermingle regular text with rotated text within the same document that is generated within the processing system and sent to the printer. To print sideways, the printer has to be switched to the sideways printing mode.
Also, in these type of printers, the code to support sideways printing is resident in the printer. Therefore, the cost of extra ROS and RAM (for a page buffer required for rotation) is added in the base material cost of the printer.
Another factor in using these printers is that a series of escape sequences, i.e. printer controls, are sent by the user to select a rotated font for sideways printing. These sequences are typically long and complicated. In addition, the definition of the escape controls in a printer of this type do not match with any standards or other ASCII printers. It is well noted that there are many application programs on the market which do not allow insertion of printer controls in the text. As a result, the user of these applications can not intermix normal and rotated printing in a single document.
For example, it may be desired to print a graph or a chart having horizontal and vertical axes. The horizontal axis may be labeled using ordinary printed text, but the vertical axis may have a better appearance if it were labeled using text that was oriented along the vertical axis, i.e., rotated 90 degrees from the horizontal text. In this example, both regular text and rotated text would be intermixed throughout the printed output. A printer that printed sideways as mentioned above could not automatically switch between regular printing and sideways printing within one document.